Myriad montage and dance: the embodiment of the cinematographic thinking in Evaldo Mocarzel

Abstract

Based on the Filmmaker´s Theory methodological approach, this article discusses the theoretical thinking of the Brazilian documentary filmmaker Evaldo Mocarzel, as observed in his documentaries about dance: São Paulo Companhia de Dança (2010); Lia Rodrigues: Canteiro de Obras and Ensaio Sobre o Movimento. It is aimed at highlighting  prominent technical procedures, such as false-raccord editing,  repetition of  gesture in cinematographic cuts, and the use of cameras coupled to the dancers´ bodies as an embodiment of a stylistic reasoning anchored on recurrent procedures in the documentarist´s work. Among his texts, essays, interviews, letters of montage, and films, one can observe systematic traces in the creative acts investigated. The focus of the present reflexive analysis lies on two fundamental issues: a) in the artistic/linguistic marriage of dance and cinema, would the filmmaker´s stylistic intention be to make the dancer become a kind of cinematographer of her/himself?, and b) would myriad montage be able to bring about the fragmentation, repetition and integration of false raccords, relating two languages intertwined by choreographic gesture-triggered cuts that make the film dance? The identification of coherence traits among the empirical objects here investigated ends up contributing to the systematization of arguments that become a theory, which, in turn,  is translated into filmic act and vice versa.